The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment. In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing.

Since the Steam client isn’t much without a game, we’re also porting L4D2 to Ubuntu. This tests the game-related features of the Steam client, in addition to L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu. Over the last few months, excellent progress has been made on several fronts and it now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. We’re working hard to improve the performance and have made good progress (more on that in a future post). Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows.

Scottish Martial Arts wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:45:It's an aesthetic call so we'll have to agree to disagree. Ubuntu's implementation of Gnome isn't the only desktop environment in the world of Linux however, and before you dismiss a monolithic Linux as being ugly and difficult to use, you might want to examine some of the other distros and desktop environments. Maybe KDE is the desktop environment you've always dreamed of but never knew to try.

I regularly check out some of the main Linux distros, usually due to reviews and previews on tech sites. My decision wasn't basely solely on Ubuntu.

Scottish Martial Arts wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:45:Not in the Unix CLI. Between regular expressions, recursive copying, and filepath completion, you can accomplish very complex file management tasks quickly, easily and efficiently. Toss in some aliases, and scripting functionality, and GUI file managers look downright primitive in comparison.

I'm sorry but I completely disagree.

Trashy wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:48:Not necessarily true, for example if you only need to copy specific file names or a specific type.

say you have 300 files of varying file types in a folder, you only need to copy the PDF files that start with bill_

you can copy them to a folder with this quick command

cp bill_*pdf /home/username/blah/

or you can spend 2 to 5 minutes arranging your file explorer to show what you want to see and then ctrl or shift click your way to select all the files you want.

Navigate to folder, sort by file type, shift-select files (which are automatically sorted by name) - that takes seconds. Plus you can type the same expression into the search bar and drag-select the files should you desire. And GUIs are much better when you're not exactly sure of the files you want. More importantly GUIs expose functionality rather than requiring you to memorise every command you'll need, as well as allowing for customisability to better suit your needs.

I'm sorry but if you're suggesting that a CLI is a better way to manage files than a GUI then we fundamentally disagree. And you'll find few who will agree with you.